


all your fevered dreams

by philthestone



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M, this one's really really old why haven't i posted it yet, trip to bespin trash because it's ALWAYS trip to bespin trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 21:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3951613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia doesn't do <em>afraid</em>. Really, she doesn't.</p><p>(If she's honest, <em>terrified</em> is the better word.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	all your fevered dreams

**Author's Note:**

> I ought to have posted this 340958034 years ago but I kept putting it off. The trip to bespin is one of my greatest weaknesses and I'll write about it til the cows comes home. I can't remember if this one is riddled with run-ons and italics, but it probably is so fair warning anyway.
> 
> Title from Fall Out Boy
> 
> Reviews are peppermint mochas from starbucks because I've not been within miles and miles of a starbucks for _months_ now and I never thought I'd say this but I really miss it.

_(What are you afraid of?)_

**

Leia decides that she likes the sound of a heartbeat by her ear.

It gives her something, she realizes.

( _A reason to ground the overwhelming darkness in reality,_ she almost wants to tell him, _to chase away the surreal and the shadow and the specters that threaten to swallow her in the night.)_

It’s nice. Steady. Reliable.

Well, mostly.

And she has to scoff; a leader in a full-out war and the last, lonely princess of an obliterated planet and she still thinks _heartbeats_ are _reliable. Pathetic, Organa,_ she wants to say, scream, groan. And, damn, but that’s nothing to say of the _owner_ of the heartbeat, is it?

( _Kriff_. But then, what’s that saying? _A girl can dream, can’t she?_ )

Regardless; it’s something to remind her that she’s still alive in the dark. Isn’t it? Darkness can’t turn into demons if she’s not dreaming, she knows, (prays) and finally, finallyfinally, something this small and insignificant has given her reason to stop running away from the night.

Then again, it could be morning – or evening, or afternoon – they’ve been stuck drifting through empty blackness for so long without any reference point that she has no idea.

(And, _then again,_ this – whatever this is – is nowhere _near_ insignificant. But go to hell, she tells the little voice in her brain, and twists harder at the wire under the life support panel – _damn_ this ship – ignores the fact that he takes his caf with more milk than is probably healthy and has a crooked scar over his right knuckle and how when he wakes up in the morning the left side of his bangs are always, always sticking up, _just so_.)

(Ignores how nice and soft and warm his lips can be on her neck.)

She wonders, sometimes, what time it is on the nearest planet. She thinks that once they arrive (actually arrive, and she feels the same cold chill – the one whose meaning she hasn’t got a damn clue about – shoot down her spine when she thinks about it), her sleeping pattern will undoubtedly be terribly off. Spacelagged for days, probably. Awake all night and sleepy and disoriented in the morning.

Of course, that’s not exactly a new thing – her sleeping patterns are mostly fragged anyway (three weeks in space with his more-than-colourful vocabulary and already she feels herself more loose-tongued than she’d like). “Sleep” is a rare anomaly that only graces her on the off night it’s feeling hospitable.

And if experience has taught her anything, it’s that sleep deprivation is nothing a good three cups of caf won’t cure - and even though they’re low on food and water and any semblance of personal space (not that she’s complaining, though wookiee hair somehow finding its way into her underclothes is a new experience), there are crates and crates and _crates_ of caf.

“It was supposed to be for the Alliance,” he tells her, all angled shoulders and slim hips leaning against the hatchway on the fourth day, when she volunteers to take inventory ( _food for a week-long journey to the other side of the Rim just ‘aint gonna cut it for four, sweetheart)_. They stand together in the cargo hold, staring at the caf-lined wall. He adds, half-grumbling, “They were gonna pay me and everything, too.”

(For what feels like almost the first time – _this trip has been full of almost-firsts_ – she doesn’t react. Tapping the datapad stylus against her mouth is the only way she voices what Lieutenant Commander Wedge Antilles has come to dub “fond exasperation”, and she catches Han’s wink as he turns to head back to the circuitry bay.)

She is thinking of the crates of caf against the wall as she lays in the dark, thermaquilted sheets drawn up to her chest because, yes, additional body heat is wonderful and comfortable and sometimes even too much, but it’s also damn _cold_ in space and she isn’t exactly wearing much else.

Crates of caf and hearbeats.

The darkness almost seems to shrink away.

It’s not that her nightmares are gone, exactly – always lingering on the edge of her subconscious, those bastards. She still gets claustrophobic when she’s in too-dark too-tight places, like the ventilation shaft in the engineering bay.

(And she’s sure that of the three of them - Threepio most certainly does _not_ count - it would have been more logical for her to clean it out – but he’d squeezed her arm, so quick and fleeting that she was sure for a moment she’d imagined it, and said, “Well, I’d better get my ass in there, then,” and the words _thank you_ almost slipped out of her mouth.)

Only, as she's discovered, demons and shadows and hollow screams crawling up your throat in the dark are easier to deal with when you have someone to wake you up when you start yelling silently into the pillow, to grab you shoulders and press their lips to your forehead and stroke your hair back when the gasping sobs that inevitably accompany _actually waking up_ make you shoulders shake and _tell ‘em to go to hell, sweetheart_ and damn, damn damn damn, this _isn’t supposed to be so screwed up._

She wonders if there is an exact moment when their sleeping arrangements change. Something to pinpoint, catalog, record, for her own sanity – but she can’t. They _weren’t_ and then they _were; aren’t_ then _are_ , and yes, she can blame the damn shower for some things (her breath still catches, sharp and hot, when he runs his fingers through her hair), but having a heartbeat beside her ear is something that just – _happens._

(In reality, she knows, it’s all his fault; doesn’t know “sensible” if it dances in front of his nose naked, and slipping into a girl’s room in the middle of the night when you hear her screamingcrying _LeiaLeia’reyoualrightshhhit’sokayit’sfineit’sadream_ is possibly, quite possibly, the _antithesis_ of sensible. 

But then. Where would they be if he hadn’t?)

She leans her head over and stops listening to the heartbeat, looks at the floor of the disheveled cabin. Her boot’s lying overturned in the corner, and that’s most likely one of his socks hanging from the handle of the drawer in the wall and that Force-forsaken ration bar rapper is still sitting crumpled on the datapads stacked in the corner. And of course, her snowsuit is folded neatly on the old, broken repulsor chair against the wall, sitting and gathering the dust of the last three weeks of ridiculously oversized shirts and borrowed, scratchy socks that can be pulled up all the way to her knees.

(She deliberately ignores the Alliance-issue underwear on the floor, though, and wonders if it’s possible to ignore reality the same way.)

They’re going to have to clean the place tomorrow, she decides. Cleaning out ventilation ducts and hydro-winch systems is all very good and well, and she may be the farthest thing from a regular princess at this particular moment in time as she ever was (her hair’s splayed everywhere on the bed, and the rough pads of his fingers pressed into her side, and she wonders how the _hell_ she got here, exactly) –

But a cluttered room is still a damn nuisance, and she’s not about to pull a Luke and just move living space when the place gets too messy to survive in.

(She doesn’t really have an answer for herself - on the whole, "can I shove reality into a hole and pretend it doesn't exist" thing - but she thinks that it’s kind of nice, actually.)

(She cannot afford to replace the _“kind of”_ with _“really”,_ just yet, not with her brain screaming _notrealnotrealwon’tlast_ ever other half-time part of the standard day.)

It’s another three missed beats before she decides, swallowing once and taking a sharp breath

_(the Unshakeable Princess of the Rebellion, afraid of the dark – hah!)_

that it’s too quiet, now that she can’t hear the heartbeat, and turns her head back, quick and jerky, presses her cheek close to his chest. It’s scratchy and too-warm, despite the cool cabin, and her cheek bumps against his collarbone when he inhales, but there, _there it is –_

 _Thumpthump_ , and she almost breathes a sigh of relief.

He shifts and mutters something she can’t quite catch – and of all the things that she’s learned about him in the past little while, the fact that he can sleep like a rock but wake up at the slightest movement still unnerves her, just a little – and she bites her lip and presses her face closer to his chest.

 _Damn you, Han,_ she thinks, and squeezes her eyes shut, like maybe somehow she can block everything but the heartbeat out.

**

_(Afraid? I’m not afraid.)_


End file.
